Obama White House Hypocritically Pays Women Less Than Men

Paycheck Fairness: The president who repeated the feminist "77 cents" myth and touted equal pay for equal work in the State of the Union hasn't practiced what he preaches with the women he employs.

The feminist heroine that prompted the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act might be surprised to learn of the Obama White House's war on women, paying its female staffers only 87 cents on the dollar compared with their male counterparts. So when Obama lectured that "women deserve equal pay for equal work," he hasn't exactly been true to his school.

Last September, economist Mark J. Perry noted that an analysis of salary data from the 2013 Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff showed the 228 female White House employees were being paid a median annual salary of $65,000 while 231 male staffers earned a median annual salary of nearly $75,000.

As Perry pointed out, that meant women working for Obama are paid less than 87 cents for every dollar paid to male staffers, and there is, therefore, a significant White House "gender pay gap" of more than 13%.

No less than feminist author Hanna Rosin has exposed the 77-cent myth, pointing out in Slate in August that while the official Labor Department statistics show the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77% of the median earnings of full-time males, that's an aggregate of all workers in various jobs and is different from claiming they do the same work.

Factoring in life choices such as getting married or taking time off to start a family, Rosin found the gap closes to where women earn 91 cents for the "same work."

"Women congregate in different professions than men do, and the largely male professions tend to be higher-paying," she said. Rosin also notes that "full time" means 35 hours a week, but men work more hours than women.

To get an accurate figure, you need to compare men and women with the same education, the same length of time on the job, who work roughly the same number of hours, and, yes, really do have the "same job."

During the 2008 campaign, columnist Deroy Murdock wrote that female staffers in Obama's U.S. Senate office were also shortchanged, the average man making $54,397, the average woman $45,152. This might be partly explained by Obama having only one woman among his top five staffers and seven among his top 20.

Whatever the case, the president has long been guilty of a transgression that he accuses others of. He needs to move on from this issue because he lacks the moral authority to get behind it.

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